F, 29
Trigger Warning: The following story contains themes of sexual assault. Please consider your readiness to read before continuing and contact services if you need to:
Lifeline: 13 11 14 – 24hrs/7 days per week
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 – 24hrs/7 days per week
Catherine* grew up as an only child with two parents who had very different parenting styles from one another.
“I had a good relationship with both my parents until I was a teenager.
I argued a lot with my mum, but I had a really, really good relationship with my dad.”
Catherine’s dad modelled openness about difficult life experiences, which created safety and trust in their relationship.
“He was always very open about his upbringing, especially when I was a teenager.
He talked about his own substance use and his own decision making from when he was younger, which made him really approachable to go to when I did things or things happened to me, that I wasn’t comfortable with.”
Consent
Catherine’s teenage years and early adulthood have included a series of both uncomfortable and traumatic experiences regarding sex and consent. Something that made these experiences even more difficult was a lack of education regarding sexual health and consent and not knowing where to turn to for that information.
“I had a boyfriend for four years through high school, and we started doing sexual stuff quite early.
I was an only child, so I didn’t have anybody to really describe to me how things worked.
I had to Google a lot of stuff on my own because I was too embarrassed to ask people at school [about sex] and a lot of people at school seemed to learn from older siblings.”
While Catherine is now well versed in understanding sexual health and consent, it is only in more recent years that she has been able to make greater sense of her experiences.
“The first time I actively remember being pressured into anything, I would have been 15 [years old].
We had a real phase of 14th and 15th birthday parties that were boy-girl sleepovers… There would have been 30 of us in a room…
Looking back, the parents should not have allowed that.”
It was at one of these birthday parties that Catherine first felt a boundary was crossed without consent.
“There was not really a point where he asked, ‘Is this okay?’
I’ve looked back on that as an adult and there was definitely a lot more room for consent there.
[At the time] it never bothered me because we were in a relationship together, and I didn’t think a lot of it.
But I think our sexual activity kind of gradually became a little bit blurred in terms of… sometimes I wanted to have sex, sometimes I didn’t, but I just would because he would start.”
“This is what you want”
Catherine experienced similar issues around consent with a separate boyfriend in Year 12 of high school.
“That was the first situation where I was like, ‘I’ve actually said no, and you’ve done it anyway.’
There were a couple of occasions when I think that he thought he was being romantic… But our relationship didn’t last very long because when he thought he was being romantic, he was actually being controlling and scary.”
A particular experience at his grandparent’s house crossed a significant boundary.
“That freaked me out really fast… I made him stop, but I did it in a way that wouldn’t make him feel uncomfortable.
As an adult [if I were in that situation now], I would lose my mind… But as a teenager, I was just like, ‘Oh, I don’t really feel like having sex right now,’ and then he stopped.”
After they broke up, he and Catherine still had contact.
“There were a couple of times [after our breakup] where we were having a conversation and he would try and do things that I was uncomfortable with.”
When he would do things that made Catherine feel uncomfortable, Catherine devised a mechanism for trying to protect herself.
“I used to call it my fence, which was my way of setting a sexual boundary with him. [I would use it] when he would try and do things I wasn’t comfortable with yet.
I would do this [hand gesture] and I would say, ‘The fence is up.’
That was my way of being like, ‘Do not go past this point.’
But he thought it was cute, and he would push past that barrier.”
This pushing and crossing of boundaries was a regular occurrence in the relationship.
“There was another time where we were having an argument, and it got reasonably heated… He pushed me up against a wall, and I think he thought it was like a heat-of-the-moment sexual thing, but to me, it wasn’t. To me, it was really intimidating.
I actively said, ‘You need to stop. I don’t want this… And he was like, ‘No, this is hot… This is what you want,’ and I said, ‘No, it’s actually fucking not.’
Thankfully, he then listened so it didn’t go any further.”
Looking back, Catherine thinks that expecting consent wasn’t even within her awareness due to a lack of education on the topic, nor was her boyfriend at the time taught about asking for consent.
“Nobody before my husband ever said, ‘Are you okay with this? Is this what you want to do?’
It just kind of happened.”
These early sexual experiences had an ongoing impact on Catherine.
“I struggled to get anything out of sex for a really long time because it was never about me. It was never about us as a joint unit.”
Forced Confessions
Fast forward to schoolies – a party weekend where high school leavers head off to celebrate finishing school over an alcohol-fuelled weekend. It was supposed to be a time of carefree fun.
“At schoolies, I smoked weed for the first time, which was the first time I had ever touched a drug. I was very new to alcohol as well…
I literally had a puff [of a joint] and I was off my face because it was the first time [I’d smoked weed].”
When Catherine realised that all of her friends had left the house they were staying at to go to the beach, she decided to join them. But she didn’t want to walk alone in the dark out of fear for her safety.
“I thought, ‘Who’s still [at the house] that I can trust that will walk me to the beach without being alone?’”
As Catherine searched the house for someone who may have been able to walk with her, she found Darren.*
“I was really good friends with [Darren]… [The friendship] was always platonic.
He was, and still is, a very active church member.
He came down from his bedroom, and I said, ‘I want to go to the beach party. Can you walk me there?’ And he said ‘Sure.’
Looking back, he didn’t actually walk me to the beach party at all. He obviously walked me to a different part of the beach because we didn’t actually [meet] anybody else.”
Once they were at a part of the beach with no one else in sight, the conversation took an uncomfortable, unexpected turn for Catherine. Darren started making sexual remarks.
Despite Darren having a girlfriend, he then asked Catherine for sexual favours. When she declined, Darren kept insisting. So, Catherine gave in to one of the demands to try and put an end to the situation.
Catherine had entered a ‘fawn’ response, which is a survival mechanism whereby people avoid conflict or threat by appeasing the other person.
Darren was continuing to force Catherine into sexual actions, when two people from the group, who were also members of the church, found them.
“I was actively pushing him away and saying no, and that’s when they walked up.
Very quickly, [the other two people] separated us.
I think they knew it wasn’t consensual.”
The girls [who found us] stayed with me. 20 minutes later, they [started] god-shaming me and were quoting bible verses at me.
And I said to them, ‘a) I I’m not religious and b) I wasn’t [doing anything]. I know he has a girlfriend… You can spurt bible verses at me as much as you like. I don’t care. That’s not what was going on.’”
Despite Catherine being the victim in the situation, what happened next was dumbfounding.
“The whole group got told that I was [performing a sexual act on Darren].
[Darren and the two girls] sat me in a room… Darren was crying and the girls said, ‘You have to tell Darren’s girlfriend that you [did it] because this isn’t Darren’s fault.’”
Due to the immense peer pressure and fear of repercussions, Catherine felt as though she had little choice.
“The social pressure was just overwhelming. As a freshly 18-year-old, I was heavily, heavily influenced by social pressure. My whole world was that everybody liked me, and I would do anything to make sure everybody liked me.
[So], he called his girlfriend, and I apologised.
They sat there and watched me to make sure that I followed through [while] I apologised. I said to Darren’s girlfriend, ‘I’m really sorry. I just got carried away. I was high for the first time… we’ll never do it again and it wasn’t something I’m proud of.’
Everybody thought that I [did it] because I wanted to.”
While Catherine had both been forced into the initial situation and the apology, it was Catherine who suffered the fallout from the events, not Darren.
“I lost a lot of my friends from high school from that event.”
In more recent years, the events came up in conversation with some old school friends.
“Four or five years ago I went to a dinner party, and some people from school were there.
Darren came up in conversation and a few other girls said, ‘Oh, he was a fucking creep at this thing’ or ‘He was a creep at a party a couple of years ago.’
I just kind of sat there quietly… and then one of the guys [at the dinner] spoke up and said, ‘Look, Catherine, I’m actually really sorry, because I believed [Darren], and it’s very clear now that [he was lying] and I’m really, really sorry.’”
Although it doesn’t change what happened to Catherine, this apology and acknowledgement was profound.
“[At the time] I hadn’t even really processed what had happened, so I just said, ‘It’s all good mate, don’t worry about it.’
But then I went away and thought, ‘Someone actually believes me… Someone actually thinks that I’m telling the truth…’ which was really nice.
I had a cry afterwards.”
The Europe Trip
Devastatingly, the sexual assault that had the most profound effect on Catherine was yet to come.
“I was on a four-week [guided group tour of Europe].
By the end of the fourth week, I had very much forgotten that I was travelling [without friends from home]… I had fallen into this weird, false sense of security that the people around me were my friends, which is very easy to do when you’re on a solo trip with other people who are solo travelling.
You bond very quickly, and I got this kind of pseudo feeling of safety that if something went wrong, [the other people in the group] would look after me.
Even though I actually hadn’t known those people for that long you think, ‘I’m gonna be friends with these people for the rest of my life.’”
A large part of these guided backpacking tour groups was the drinking culture.
“There’s lots of pressure [on these tours] to just keep drinking, and a lot of judgement if you’re having a night off.
You stop having that pseudo-friendship group if you stop going out and drinking all the time with them… And my [biggest] driver when I was younger was, ‘be liked at all costs.’ So, I just kept going out despite the fact I did not want to.
This particular night in Rome, I put my foot down and said, ‘I’m not going out.’ There were like six girls [the room I was staying in] and they put on a huge amount of peer pressure.
[Initially] I stayed in the hostel [but after] 15 minutes on my own I [decided] to go so I didn’t miss out. The party was like directly across the road, so you could walk out across the road and [be] there.”
When Catherine arrived at the party, everyone was sharing drinks.
“There was no covering your drink, [and] it was very much just, ‘drink whatever anyone hands you.’
And again, we’d been travelling for four weeks and nothing bad had happened, so [that provided a] false sense of security. We were drinking these massive jugs of alcohol, and I must have had my own drink at some point.
The memories of the second half of the night are quite blurry, which I attribute to being drugged because I’ve never felt that way and I didn’t drink that much.”
While the memories from this point forth are fragmented, Catherine remembers an Italian man walking her back to the hostel across the road.
“I remember the receptionist [at the hostel] yelling at the guy I was with and looking at me and shaking her head. [The receptionist] wasn’t speaking in English [except for saying], “No, no, no, no, no, no.’
She was telling me not to go somewhere [with him] and I don’t remember much after that.”
While Catherine was able to recall pieces of what happened next, we have chosen to withhold these details. After the sexual assault happened, Catherine remembers sitting on the curb outside the hostel and crying intensely.
After going back to the hostel, Catherine was sexually assaulted a second time in the women’s bathroom. She cannot recall whether or not it was the same person due to the effects of having her drink spiked. Again, most of the details she does remember have been withheld.
Catherine decided not to tell anyone else on the tour about what had happened and the nonconsensual nature of the events.
“[The tour] finished the next day… We went to The Colosseum, got some pizza and then the [tour] was over, and everyone just went their own separate ways.”
Catherine now has knowledge of some of the dangers that she was not warned of by the tour operators at the time.
“Having done my own research now, I know that Italy is a really well-known place for drugging travellers… And because this particular hotel is across the road from a hostel, it is a particularly high target.
One failure that I attribute to the [the tour operators] is that they would know that and they don’t tell you.”
While Catherine didn’t tell anyone on the tour itself, Catherine later found out that she had called her Aunty back home in a state of blackout.
“I felt my poor aunty a voicemail.
She never told anybody, but she played it to me when I got home and was like, ‘What happened this night?’
I wasn’t even speaking English… It was really intense.”
Getting Home
Once the tour finished, Catherine had plans to travel for another two weeks. However, she was traumatised by the sexual assaults and had been dealing with a sinus infection for a couple of weeks.
“I went to Iceland for three days but [I was] was really, really sick. Also, [the sexual assaults] had stripped me bare of any will do anything… which was really sad because it was one of my favourite places that I went to, but I was so scared and so unwell.
When I was in Iceland, I called my parents and had an absolute breakdown. I didn’t tell them what had happened [yet], but I just said, ‘You need to get me home.’”
Catherine’s parents sprang into action and changed her flights to come home early. While waiting for a flight out of London, Catherine hardly left the hotel room.
“I literally just laid in bed, cried, and steamed myself in the shower so that I could breathe.”
Disclosure
While Catherine was relieved to be home, getting back to Australia was just the start of what was to be a traumatic period of time. The first major trigger was a cruise holiday that Catherine went on with her parents and their family friends. At this point, the only reason Catherine had given for needing to come home was physical illness.
“It was just your classic Australian Pacific Island cruise where everyone just gets boozy the whole time.
[But] I could not drink and nobody understood why. I couldn’t go to the club, I couldn’t go to the bars, I couldn’t do anything.
So, I spent a lot of time by myself because none of the people my age understood. They were just like, ‘Oh, I think she just drank too much in Europe, so she’s just not drinking.’”
Another telltale sign was Catherine’s discomfort in wearing any of the outfits she had packed.
“I took all these outfits, and I couldn’t even wear anything that exposed my shoulders… or any part of me that could be sexualised.
[I had packed] typical nightclub outfits, but even a crop top and a short skirt… I couldn’t dream about [wearing that].
I was in a jumper and leggings for the whole cruise. It was like an absolute nightmare.”
While on the cruise, Catherine’s parents eventually noticed that Catherine seemed different to her usual self and raised it with her, which led to her telling them about the sexual assaults.
“My parents were asking, ‘What is going on? This is not you…’
[So], I told my parents. I was so scared to tell them, and I hadn’t told my husband yet… I hadn’t told anybody.
They both burst into tears.
My dad said sorry for not protecting me… And then we just sat there and cried for like 20 minutes.
It was both awful and really, really nice.”
Reflecting on it now, Catherine’s parent’s reactions were vital to feeling supported.
“It was nice that I had such a supportive family that I could tell.
It is a testament to who my mum is and who my dad was.
My Dad stopped drinking [to support me] and just spent time with me, which was really, really nice.”
In particular, Catherine found her dad’s support to be vital.
“But I think especially being an only child, Dad never forgave himself.
But he was so supportive… He found me a psychologist, he took me to the appointments, and he paid for it all.
And he always brought it up. He always asked, ‘How are you coping with that? I want to talk about it.’
He learned about PTSD to be able to help me… He was a good man.”
After returning from the cruise, the trauma response continued for some time.
“There were a lot of issues that followed on from [the sexual assaults] that lingered until about two or three years ago.
I didn’t drink for probably four years… Even being in a public space, like at a pub, or at a party… made me have a panic attack.
My husband didn’t understand… I didn’t tell him straight away because I had so much shame. I felt like I cheated on him.”
When Catherine got back from both the overseas trip and the cruise, she wasn’t initially ready to tell her husband about the sexual assaults.
“The weekend I got back [from overseas] we had a party on… I went, but I just drove.
[My husband] was like, ‘Oh, you’re just wrecked from being overseas.’
And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is.’”
Eventually, a situation arose where she ended up telling him.
“It was 21st [birthday] season and we had a party every other weekend. We had a few in a row and I was getting really angry at him for drinking and having a good time and I hadn’t told him what had happened.
Any party we went to, it would be like 8:30pm and I’d be like, ‘We’re done, I want to go home.’
[My husband didn’t want to go home] and he thought that I wanted to because I was tired.
There was one party in particular where I just couldn’t cope… I went to the bathroom and had a complete meltdown.
I was just so scared, and I couldn’t shake how scared I was of being in public places where there were alcohol and people. So, I ran out of the part. He followed me out, got angry and said, ‘What the fuck is going on? You need to tell me. You have not been the same since you got home.’”
That was the moment that Catherine disclosed the sexual assaults to her husband.
“The second I told him, he was like, ‘Let’s go.’
He felt so awful.”
The Aftermath
After returning home, Catherine’s social life was greatly affected by her trauma responses and protective mechanisms. Catherine experienced panic attacks whenever she was in a place where alcohol was being served.
“When you’re in your early 20s, a lot of your friendships revolve around hanging out on weekends and drinking. I was also doing MDMA on quite a regular basis before I went to Europe… Probably every weekend for about two years. So, my friends at the time were very much regular drug takers.
I just did a complete 180-degree turn [after the assaults], so I lost a lot of connections with the people who I grew up with.
I didn’t drink for three years, and I definitely stopped doing drugs.”
The sexual assaults also affected Catherine’s eating behaviours and body image.
“I had an eating disorder history anyway, which was bulimia nervosa. So, I was a good friend of the binge-restrict cycle. I was definitely coping by eating.”
While Catherine had an eating disorder history, her psychologist helped her identify the link between that history and her coping behaviours.
“I’ve worked through this [now] with a psychologist, but I was very much eating to avoid.
The psychologist said, ‘These are the normal things that people might cope with [following trauma],’ and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah that’s me.’
I very quickly gained about 20 kilos… I felt like it protected me. I wasn’t consciously doing it at the time, but I’ve realised that on reflection.”
The assaults also changed how Catherine would dress.
“Everything I wore just made me look like a shapeless blob.
I completely changed my wardrobe so that nothing showed my hips or my chest or any, literally any part of me.
I would have been a size 10 when I was 20 years old, and I would have gone up to a size 14 or 16. But everything I was buying was a size 20.
I just couldn’t deal with my clothing grabbing my body in any way.”
Two of the more classic PTSD symptoms that Catherine experienced were nightmares and flashbacks.
“Flashbacks are very intrusive and sudden. It’s almost like a form of hallucination.
All of a sudden, you’re back there and you’ve got all the emotions and all the visceral and physiological experiences from that moment… they just come back.”
Even though Catherine can identify them now, at the time she didn’t know they were flashbacks.
“The flashbacks were very intrusive and out of nowhere. I didn’t even know they were flashbacks [at the time].
Sometimes I would be sitting on a bus or driving my car I’d get one. I would always have to pull over to calm myself down because back then I didn’t have any techniques to deal with it yet.
It was very visceral… it was like I was there, and it was happening again.”
Due to not knowing that what she was experiencing were even flashbacks, it took a while for Catherine to receive help.
“The flashbacks happened quite consistently for a year, so I started thinking, ‘This is my life now.’
I didn’t get therapy for it straight away because I didn’t know what they were.”
Intimacy
Understandably, one of the ways in which sexual assault affects an individual is in regard to intimacy. Catherine’s personal alarm system was looking out for danger at all times – hypervigilant to any possible threats. However, after a traumatic incident, the brain can start to have difficulty working out what is a real threat and what is not.
“My husband and I didn’t have sex for six months afterwards… but I probably didn’t actively want sex for 18 months.
At first, it was like, don’t touch me. Don’t even dream of touching me. Hugging on the couch? No, couldn’t do it.
My heart rate would get faster, and I would start sweating really quickly, and I would flinch away. Even if he would try to touch my leg, I would flinch my leg away. It was automatic.
I would immediately panic… It took a lot of work together [to overcome it].
I needed my bubble, and I’ve never been a bubble person, but for that period of time, my bubble got really, really big, and I didn’t want anybody anywhere near me.”
Seeking Help
Catherine’s Dad eventually supported her to see a psychologist, who diagnosed her with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“I had heard of PTSD, but I thought it was only for people in the army… I thought it was just something you got from going to war.
I had no idea that it applied to sexual assault.
it took me a while to accept [the diagnosis] because I felt like [the psychologist] was overreacting.”
Catherine required intensive therapy to treat her PTSD and help to minimise the impact it was having on her day-to-day life.
“I saw her for about six months. It was weekly for a while because I was struggling pretty hardcore with it.”
One of the core components of treatment focussed on beliefs that can be formed following a traumatic event.
“We talked a lot about blame… At first, I very much blamed myself… my history of sex with guys played a bit of a role in that. But she basically led me to conclude that it wasn’t my fault.
[The psychologist] asked me, ‘At what point would it have been appropriate for you to give consent?’ And I remember that conversation catching me off guard because I hadn’t even really thought about consent before.
That was a big turning point for me… to relieve myself from the blame.”
Recovery & Lingering Effects
While Catherine has made significant strides in her recovery from PTSD, sometimes it still catches her off guard.
“I actually had a flashback recently that caught me off guard…
[Recently] I went to go to the bathroom before bed and my husband was in a weird mood… He followed me into the bathroom and put his hands on my shoulders… Instinctively, I ducked down to the floor and screamed… He did not know what was happening.
I could see on his face that he was shocked, and he was really, really apologetic.
I was really embarrassed because that hadn’t happened for a long time.
At first, I didn’t know where it came from, but then we sat in bed and talked about it for about an hour and I realised [it was linked to the sexual assaults].”
Sometimes particularly graphic movie or book scenes can be triggering too.
“About two months ago, I read a book that had quite an explicit sexual assault scene. It was out of nowhere as well… No trigger warning at all.
That was rough… I didn’t read the whole thing… I just couldn’t.
Plus, reading is for enjoyment or learning and if you’re reading a book to enjoy it and that’s what’s happening, then it’s not worth it.”
While not as triggering as it was at first, settings that involve alcohol can still be difficult, too.
“Parties and drinking are still a bit of a problem.”
When Catherine knows a particular event or occasion may involve heavy drinking, this can be anxiety-provoking.
“There’s a lot of anticipation in that for me… I kind of have to build myself up to it.
I have the best time if I get drunk accidentally because I don’t have time to anticipate things going wrong.”
Sometimes this anxiety leads Catherine to drink more quickly to numb the anxiety around what could happen.
“When the intention is to get drunk, I’ll get drunk at the beginning of an event because then it gradually wears off until the end.
I try to get drunk quite fast now… That’s something that helps a lot because I have a good time while everybody else is safe and nobody else is ‘silly drunk,’ then I can sober up in time for other people to be silly drunk so that I can protect myself.”
Catherine has also been working in a field that triggered some lingering symptoms when she first started.
“When I started [there], some of my PTSD symptoms came back… I had a couple of flashbacks.
I didn’t actually put it together initially, but I was reading about men sexually assaulting women… All of a sudden, I didn’t want my husband anywhere near me… [Even] hand holding or kissing me goodbye. I would flinch and internally my whole body was like, ‘Get away.’
[My husband] obviously noticed the difference… So, one night we had a conversation about it and asked him, ‘What is your interpretation? I just need some help here because I don’t know what’s going on and it’s really scary… I don’t know why I feel like this.’
We unpacked it together and worked out that it was only since I had started [this job] and it was very much correlating with me reading about incidences of sexual assault.
Fortunately, since then I’ve managed for that to go down again, which has been great.”
An area of symptomatic improvement for Catherine has been the degree to which she is triggered in public places.
“For a long time, I pretended to [enjoy public spaces]… I would just put myself in them and hope for the best.
But in the last three to four years, I have started enjoying public spaces again.”
One thing that really helps Catherine to work through her trauma and stay well is the support from, and connection with, her husband.
“We have a beautiful relationship that’s very consensual.
We’ve done lots of exploration together and with others, and it’s always been very open communication… [Discussing], ‘What do you want? What was good? What wasn’t good?’ Having safe words… all those sorts of things… that’s been amazing.”
Something that has helped Catherine make peace with her PTSD is coming to realise and accept that her symptoms will ebb and flow.
“A pretty consistent part of my mental health journey has been realising that even when you’re out of the [worst of it], there will always be a few little weeds that pop up.
You can try to conceptualise mental health as having a problem, getting help or not and then the symptoms disappearing… But it doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared forever and that’s okay.
Being accepting of that ebb and flow of symptoms can help with having less negative self-talk when the symptoms do come up again.”
