From a web site?
I can't find the citation for this right now, but I wanted to put this here for you. I definitely agree with the conclusion.
The Truth About Your Healing Potential
In some circles, there is an idea that if you are sexually victimized, then you must suffer for the rest of your life. This is not true. You will suffer only as long as habituated, self-injuring thoughts remain free to do their mischief. When you decide to no longer just sit there and take it, then you will have begun to heal.
Can you recall a time that you were physically injured - say a scraped knee while biking as a child? Okay. Can you recall the excruciating pain of that moment? Is it difficult for you to hold those memories in your mind? Probably not. You can recall the incident and even the terrible physical pain of the moment, but you are not re-traumatized by the memory.
Let's pretend that your community severely disapproves of scraped knees, that it is considered to be an extremely shameful thing -indicating that the injured person is some kind of lowlife. You would have hidden your injury, avoided medical care and kept the knowledge of the injury a secret for years. You would have covered your injury when going out into the community and you would have experienced shame. In short, there would be traumatic thinking associated with the memory of the injury. This traumatic thinking would be activated just by the memory of the injury.
Many young children are traumatized by injuries as slight as a scraped knee. Their childlike thinking tells them that something horrible has happened. Their emotional energies then take on this shape - fear and panic. Since scraped knees are not shameful in our world, your thinking about this kind of injury has grown up with you. It has not been suppressed under a blanket of shame, fear and secrecy. If you scraped your knee today, it would hurt physically as usual, but your grown-up thinking would process the event in an age appropriate manner. You would not be panicked.
Because you've had the opportunity to allow your thinking to grow up, the fear and panic thinking has not become habituated, as far as knee scraping goes at least. Scraped knees are a temporarily painful nuisance, not a tragedy.
Being able to recall incidents of sexual victimization with only modest discomfort is a realistic goal. It is possible to downgrade sexual victimization from being a life-altering, never-ending trauma, to difficult experiences that once happened, that are not traumatic to recall. I kid you not. This is possible.