“It’s not your fault” Isn’t always the Answer (Unless you’re Robin Williams).

Trigger Warning: This blog post contains a personal story involving sexual assault. We understand that this topic can be deeply upsetting or activating for some readers. Please take care of yourself as you read whether that means stepping away, skipping over parts of this post, or reaching out for support. Please take care when reading.

Can you imagine blaming yourself for the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? 

I can. 

I’m writing this blog at 3:50am. I’ve struggled with insomnia for years, and while I have medication that usually keeps it in check, tonight was one of those nights. I lay there, unable to get comfortable, too hot, too cold, too full of thoughts. At one point, those thoughts turned to a woman I met years ago, who also had trouble sleeping sometimes. My memory of her got me out of bed, reaching for my glasses, and eventually my laptop. 

I want to tell you about this person and the lesson she taught me. 

We met on what I imagine was one of the worst nights of her life. I was working as an on-call sexual assault counselor and had been called to the hospital sometime after midnight. The dispatch relayed to me that the assault had happened earlier that evening, that the survivor had been attacked at gunpoint by a stranger, and, following the rape, had been able to get to safety and call the police. I met her husband in the waiting room, who had accompanied her to the hospital, and then entered the exam room to meet her privately.

While I know cognitively that there are many ways a person can respond in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, this survivor’s response took me by complete surprise. I had heard survivors hold themselves responsible for their victimization before, but none as vehemently and as adamantly as this survivor blamed herself. She would not stop apologizing. She apologized for inconveniencing every member of the team, saying again and again how sorry she was that we all had to come there in the middle of the night. She must have said, “I’m sorry” and “It’s all my fault” more than a dozen times in just the first few minutes of meeting each other. 

When I share this experience in workshops I’m facilitating, I pause here and ask the audience what they think I might have been feeling or wanting to do at this moment. And there’s almost always a resounding, “You want to tell her- stop blaming yourself!! It’s not your fault!” 

They’re right. That’s what I wanted to say. But that’s not what I did. 

On a recent flight to visit family, I rewatched Good Will Hunting for the first time in decades. Man, I love that movie. I’d like to think I’d appreciate it even if I wasn’t from Boston, and given its accolades, I probably would. I feel a particular ache watching Robin Williams portray an imperfect, loving, grieving, and incredibly skilled clinician. There is nothing quite like the scene when he tells Will, played by Matt Damon, that the years of abuse he experienced were not his fault. You see the anger and resistance in Matt’s body as he tries to push this sentiment away physically, and the eventual sobs of grief and heartbreak when the words finally break through. 

Maybe that’s what my audience pictures I would have done when facing a survivor who is punishing herself for the life-altering decision another person made to attack her. But I’m no Robin Williams, and this isn’t a movie. 

This survivor blamed herself for her rape. She told me that she hadn’t been able to sleep- it was unusually hot for where we were living- and eventually she decided to get out of bed, throw on some clothes, and go for a walk to a mini-mart down the road to get a soda, cool off, and try to get back to sleep. It was on her way there that she was attacked. 

“If I just hadn’t gotten out of bed,” she said. “If I hadn’t left my house, none of this would have happened.” 

As she began to apologize to me again, I took a deep breath and reminded myself of some truths I had learned. This traumatic event had just taken place. It was the first hours since this woman had survived what was a life-threatening experience. She may have very little memory of me, what I looked like, what I said, in the aftermath of this evening. But I could do my best to plant some seeds in our interaction that I hoped would stay with her and grow over time. 

The first seed I wanted to plant was that her feelings were valid and deserved to be honored. If I started by telling her not to blame herself, I would be invalidating her experience. And I don’t know about you, but someone instructing me not to feel something has rarely, if ever, worked. It instead makes me feel frustrated, minimized, and motivated to hide how I really feel. I know that feelings don’t change or disappear by denying them or hiding them. The more we resist our feelings, the longer they persist. We have to honor our feelings and move through them. 

So I said to her, “I hear you. I hear that you feel like this is your fault.” I used the exact language she used to reflect exactly what I heard from her. 

Then came the next seed I wanted to plant. In this moment, this survivor believed that her assault was her fault. Blaming herself was also a way, in the immediate aftermath, to believe she had control over what happened —that she made it happen —because then she could believe that she could stop it from ever happening again. 

The truth is, she was not raped at gunpoint because she went for a walk. She had walked in her neighborhood, including at night, many times before and never been attacked. Shouldn’t we all be able to walk in our neighborhood when we’re struggling to sleep, and not worry that we could be raped or killed? Her decision to leave her house was not why she was victimized. Another person, a person she had no control over, chose to assault her. Rapes happen because rapists choose to rape. 

But when you’ve just gone through that experience, hearing that it was not your fault can, for some, be overwhelming and terrifying. If they understand that they did nothing to make it happen, they may feel overwhelmed about moving through the world, knowing they can’t prevent it from happening again. 

Unfortunately, friends and family may also struggle with believing that this could not have been prevented because they also feel an overwhelming loss of control. Sadly, this can manifest in friends and family blaming their loved one for their assault. And being blamed by someone you love for your own victimization can be even more painful than the trauma itself. 

I didn’t know what kind of response this survivor would get from her friends and family in the coming hours, days, months. All I could control was what I said next. 

“I hear that you feel like this is your fault. I want you to know that I don’t think it’s your fault. I don’t blame you for what happened. I don’t think anything you did tonight made this other person attack you. I don’t think this is your fault. But I really hear that you feel like it’s your fault. I hear you.” 

I used the word “I” a lot. I’m not asking this survivor to change how she feels. I’m also not going to join her in this belief. I wanted to plant a seed that someone else didn’t blame her for what happened. My hope for her is that over time, if she is able to honor her feelings, she will move through them and maybe, someday, no longer blame herself for what was done to her. And that even if there are people in her life that make her feel like it was her fault, she will remember that there was someone- and hopefully more along the way- that didn’t blame her, either. 

We can want survivors to believe that it’s not their fault, but we can’t force anyone to feel something until they are ready. Rather than try to push them to where we want them to be, we can meet them exactly where they are. And when we do that, we may find that, when given the choice and the space to feel the breadth and depth of their experience, they can begin a healing process.